A Celebration of the Lindy Hop’s Founder

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Swing dance enthusiasts from around the world are arriving in New York to celebrate the 100th birthday of the late Frankie Manning, who helped popularize the dance craze Lindy hop.Published OnMay 23, 2014CreditImage by Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times

Jana Grulichová and Nick Pankuch are among the many Lindy hoppers in New York for the Frankie 100 festival.CreditJulieta Cervantes for The New York Times

The anticipation was building even before the start of the five-day festival on Thursday, said Heidi Rosenau, a Lindy hop enthusiast and an administrator at the Frick Collection. “It began,” she said, “with a lesson taught by godlike Swedes” last weekend.

While dancers in places like California and Britain played important roles in the revival of the Lindy hop, dance historians say Swedes were essential.

“The thing about godlike, I’m not really sure,” said Catrine Ljunggren, a Swedish-born swing dancer and instructor. “But we were pretty much the first people who took it seriously again after the ’30s and ’40s.” So seriously that there is even a camp devoted solely to teaching the dance.

The organizers expect more than 2,000 dancers from 47 countries to attend the festival, which includes workshops and competitions. “It’s pretty international now,” said Donna Skiff, the director of the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “It’s a fun dance, and you don’t have to have real ballet training to do it. It means people without all that training can participate in dance, and people at all age levels. I’m amazed that the ones we’ve had here for performances, they’re young. They’re, like, teenagers. They dress the part. They look like that era.”

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Lindy hoppers Tony Fraser and Jaime Shannon, aloft.CreditJulieta Cervantes for The New York Times

The look of the original Lindy hoppers did not last into the 1950s and 1960s, and its popularity faded. Ms. Ljunggren, who now lives in New York, said she learned the Lindy hop in Sweden in 1979 after another dancer was intrigued by a sequence in the Marx Brothers movie “A Day at the Races.”

“He came running to us and said, ‘I have seen what we need to do,’ ” she recalled. “We didn’t know what this dance was.”

It was the Lindy hop. They learned it by watching the movie and by tracking down dancers in New York who were old enough to remember its heyday. Before long, Sweden had a camp for Lindy hop enthusiasts where Elliott Donnelley, one of four principal organizers of the weekend festival in New York, ended up.

His Lindy hop journey began when he was 10 years out of college and living in San Francisco. “I was horrible at dancing with women,” he said, “and I had a wedding coming up.”

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Frankie Manning and Lucille Middleton while on tour with Hollywood Hotel Revue in New Zealand during the summer of 1938.CreditSteele

So he signed up for lessons after passing a local dance studio. “I started out with my brother doing Argentine tango, but the instructor left with her blond boyfriend from Germany who looked like Fabio. Our future in tango looked like it had ended.”

But a crash course in swing dancing began.

A few months later, on an already-planned trip to Europe — Mr. Donnelley was to row in the Henley Royal Regatta — he and his brother sandwiched in a stop at the Swedish Lindy hop camp. They had not planned to spend much time there, only a few days. They had other items on their itinerary, like mountain climbing in the Alps.

One by one, those other plans were canceled.

“We kept going in to the director of the camp and extending our stay,” Mr. Donnelley said. “We were there for three weeks.”

It was there that he met Mr. Manning, a legend among Lindy hoppers who died in 2009 at age 94.

The festival in New York was named Frankie 100 because Monday would have been Mr. Manning’s 100th birthday, and the events include a parade on Lenox Avenue in Harlem.

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Laura Asante Lindy hopped with an assist from Joshua Mclean, at DanceSport in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday.CreditJulieta Cervantes for The New York Times

He Lindied from Harlem to Hollywood when he was a young man, appearing in the 1941 comedy “Hellzapoppin” in a marathon sequence that many Lindy hoppers revere as the best such performance ever filmed. He found a place on Broadway when he was in his 70s, sharing a Tony Award for best choreography in the 1989 musical “Black and Blue.” Later still, he was a consultant for Spike Lee’s film “Malcolm X” and the made-for-television movie “Stompin’ at the Savoy.”

In 1935, he earned a place in Lindy hop history, and in the International Encyclopedia of Dance, when he executed the first air step. This involved throwing his partner, Frieda Washington, over his head during a competition at the famous Savoy Ballroom.

“He didn’t understand how influential the innovations he introduced to the Lindy hop would be,” Ms. Millman said, noting that he even changed dancers’ posture.

“It was a ballroom dance, so they had a ballroom stance,” she said. “They were upright.” He bent forward.

“He said it made him feel like he was flying,” she said.

Ms. Ljunggren remembered Mr. Manning’s first trip to Sweden, in 1987, to work with the dance group she was in, the Rhythm Hot Shots.

“How when we were sitting there in the living room could we know this would spread all over the world?” she asked. “It was just six people wanting to learn the Lindy hop from the main guy, the one who had perfected it. What we liked about it was it was very fast and furious and technically difficult. You have to be able to lift the lady — or fly in the air, if you are the lady.

“I was, and I have landed on my head many times.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Comeback for the Lindy Hop (Give Credit to Sweden). Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe